Summary of activities: FY98-99

Resource Services Department
Database Maintenance

We operated at full staff beginning November 10, 1998, when Jerry Molina joined the unit as an Archivist. The unit had 560 hours of student help during the year.
Tim Hartigan received the Libraries' Staff Achievement Award in December 1998, the University Bonus Award for Increased Productivity in April 1999, and a promotion to Senior Archivist in March 1999.
Both Tim Hartigan and Jerry Molina are active members of the Library Systems Liaison Group.
Tim Hartigan participated in the Department Performance Standards Committee.
Jerry Molina has been designated the Senior Systems Liaison for Resource Services Department, beginning June 1999.
Lawan Orser, Daniel Cromwell (Science Cataloging Unit), and Jerry Molina authored a Poster Session titled Are the Links Alive? Checking URLs in the UF Online Catalog, presented at the ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans in June 1999.

A total of 61,480 volumes in three library collections have been inventoried this year:
The inventory of the Music Library was completed in November 1998, adding 10,082 volumes to the 23,574 volumes we inventoried last year. Music Library records processed by the inventory software totaled 33,656.
The Biography Collection in the Dewey Classification in Library West totaling 10,943 volumes was inventoried between November 1998 and January 1999.
The inventory of the Latin American Collection (LAC) began in January 1999. We completed 45 % of the Dewey books and periodicals, totaling 40,455 volumes, at the end of June 1999.

As members of the Libraries' URL Task Group, unit staff made contributions in two pivotal areas. Lawan Orser introduced the conversion of the link checker's report into Excel, enabling the sorting of URLs and titles, making it easier for staff to replace the broken links with active ones. Jerry Molina runs a link checker and produces monthly Broken Link Reports for designated staff in each Processing Unit of the UF Libraries.
The UF Libraries staff, as a group, made a remarkable progress in reducing the number of broken URLs in our online catalog. The LinkBot report of November 1998 showed 795 broken links. Subsequent monthly reports indicated a steady decline in the number of broken links as illustrated in the graph below. The July 1999 report showed only 76 broken links in our online catalog.

We noted changes in certain categories of the statistics that we keep.The Inventory Software which is in full operation this year provided a growing number of statistics on item record changes which had previously been achieved manually. The software created 5,792 new item records, adding to the 3,214 created manually. The software also inserted 5,549 barcodes to existing item records, adding to the 2,083 done by hand.
Linked 2,395 unlinked item records and enabled the display of the volumes' circulation status to library users in the online catalog.
Added 325 retrospective titles to LUIS. These were titles referred by Public Services staff, or identified by our Inventory Project as missing from the online catalog..
Processed 6,243 volumes in the withdrawal, transfer, and reclassification activities: 97 % were withdrawals; 1 % was transfers between locations in the UF Libraries; and 2 % were reclassified to the Library of Congress Classification. The 6,047 volumes withdrawn this year constituted an increase of 96 % over last year. In addition, 1,530 pieces of unbound journals; 2,112 microfiches; 2 disks; and 18 videos were also withdrawn.
Continued resolving duplicate records in LUIS.

Use of electronic shelflists in Gift Program to SUS libraries continued.
Pat Crabb of FCLA provided UF circulation statistics files in machine readable form. The data is being studied for potential identification of core collections.
John Hein of UNF continued the extraction and processing of all our inventory files, playing a key role in the unit's high volume output. Using his software and in response to our request, he also generated a list of titles in LUIS owned by the UF Institute of Black Culture (IBC). The list is being used in the IBC Reading Room Inventory.

Lawan Orser, orserl@mail.uflib.ufl.edu
August 9, 1999